The Best Warm Up for Lacrosse Players

From the opening face off – lacrosse demands intensity. 

While other sports allow for players to “get into the game” or forgive a slow start – lacrosse demands that players are at peak performance from the very start. 

This is why elite lacrosse players value warm-ups so much. They know the importance and value of priming their body for performance before they even get on the field. 

If you get the opportunity to be around an NCAA team pre-game, you’ll see players investing serious time on preparing their body for performance.  Some players are even going through 30+ minutes of warm-ups that look more intensive than an average Joe's workout. 

Meanwhile, whenever we go to youth games or tournaments we see players going through a couple of lazy lunges and other haphazard exercises before grabbing their sticks and moving on. 

There’s a big gap between how elite lacrosse players and youth players prepare their bodies for games. 

And that’s why we wrote this article. 

Our goal is to give lacrosse players, whether elite players looking to further optimize their warm-up or a youth player trying to get their game dialed in. 

This is the exact formula that will prime your body for performance – so let’s dive in! 

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The Science-Based Warm-Up Protocol 

When it comes to strength & conditioning,  a lot of players and coaches have “their way” of doing things. 

Even around the NCAA, there’s a lot of variation between players, teams, and strength coaches. 

This is because there’s not just one way to do things, and warm-ups are no different. 

While players and coaches can use different exercises, generally the structure/protocol across high level players/coaches is the same – it's the R.A.M.P. protocol. 

A few years back sport scientists set out to create the optimal warm-up protocol that would allow athletes to prepare their body for maximal performance with maximal efficiency (1). 

They came to the conclusion that the modalities (type of movements) didn’t matter – but found a protocol that combined the 4 primary components that prepped the body the most. This included: 

1. Raising your temperature;
2. Activating your muscles; 
3. Mobilizing your joints;
4. Potentiating your nervous system.

As long as you choose exercises that achieve this – sports scientists suggest that your body is optimally primed for performance and your body will be ready for puck drop. 

Let’s break this down so that we can understand each component & how we can put it into practice! 

Step 1: raise your temperature 

The “R” in RAMP is pretty self explanatory – you need to raise your body temperature (2).

We like to say this means that you should do some sort of movement until you have a light sweat on. 

For most players/teams this is simply jogging, but we like to take this to the next level by doing the following: 

• 20 yard jog and back; 
• 20 yard jog and back;
• 10 yard shuffle with arm swing and jog back; 
• 10 yards shuffle with arm swing the other way and jog back. 

By the end of this, players are not only starting to break a light sweat, but they’re also starting to move more athletically than just going for a jog.

We’ll often also see players adding some quick feet drills (we even see teams do 5-6 ladder drills) or skipping rope to not only raise their temperature but also start to create kinesthetic awareness (the mind-body connection). 

We really just want to encourage players to get that sweat going before moving to the next section. 

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Step 2: Activate Your Muscles 

In our activation phase, we’re getting a bit more specific. 

Here we want to do at least 3-5 exercises that are going to fire up the body and  “wake up” the muscles.

While we’re using pretty basic terms here, these actually serve two intentional purposes: 1) create blood flow to the muscles, and 2) activate the muscles from a nervous system perspective. 

While most warm-up you’ve seen have likely seen some variation of this. Often we’ll see youth players or high school players with poor warm-up habits go through a handful of haphazard lunges and move on.

Instead our lacrosse players treat this section like a short workout. 

This is why we encourage them to have a red band and a mini-band in their gear bag.  We have them go through a short band/bodyweight circuit that leaves their body ready to perform.  Let’s break this into a banded and a bodyweight version: 

With Bands: 

Mini-Band Squats 

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Mini-Band Monster Walks 

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Mini-Band Side Steps

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Alternating Bodyweight Reverse Lunges

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Single Leg RDL 

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Banded Pull Aparts 

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Yoga Push Ups 

Without Bands 

Walking Lunges

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Bodyweight Squat 

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Inch Worms 

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Single Leg RDL 

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Yoga Push Ups

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Regardless of a player using bands or bodyweight – we really want intentional exercises where players are getting dialed in, activated, physically awake, and ready to express some strength and power. 

Player’s will often say it feels like their body has come alive and is awake and ready for work after this.

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Step 1: Mobilize Your Joints 

This is the section that most athletes think of when we talk about warm-ups. 

This is where we’re mobilizing our body and creating a range of motion across different joints.

These are not static stretches designed to increase flexibility. 

Research has repeatedly shown that dynamic exercises are far more effective than static stretches before a workout of competition (3). In fact, some studies have even shown that static stretching can decrease performance ahead of a game. 

We like to provide our players with 4-6 exercises for the mobilize section – and then encourage them to revisit “tight spots” with extra exercises after warm-up. For example, if they have a tight ankles, they can come back to doing an exercise like the ankle glider after team warm-ups (or just add to their mobility exercises if they’re solo). 

This is where the warm up should be individualized to the lacrosse player. If players do a team workout, we’ll typically recommend they go through some of these exercises and then revisit their own individual mobility exercises at the end of warm-up. 

At the end of the day it’s your responsibility to get into problem areas or address restrictions. 

Here’s what we encourage for all lacrosse players to mobilize their body pre-game:

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Reverse Lunge to Reach 

Heel Pull to Side Lunge

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World’s Greatest 

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Ankle Gliders 

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Thread the Needle 

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Pec T-Stretch

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Hip Swings 

It’s tough to nail down the exact exercises that are right for you. Sometimes these will vary on the athlete, the space available, or the time allotted. Here it’s okay to add some variation as long as we’re feeling good after this phase. 

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Step 1: Potentiate Your Nervous System 

This is the phase that a lot of lacrosse players miss. 

While they’ll warm up and mobilize their body – they haven’t primed their nervous system for maximum output. 

Potentiation: the increase in strength of nerve impulses along pathways which have been used previously, either short-term or long-term.

By adding in some jump/sprint work, we allow the nervous system to practice firing and thus allowing our body to better recruit and express force come game time. 

This could be considered a “nervous system warm-up” because we’re not focusing on anything other than firing as explosively as possible. 

In our case, we love to combine a couple of different jumps. 

Pogo Jumps to Sprint 

We like this one to fire up our calves. Really try to shoot off from those ankles/calves and then after 3 reps, explode into a sprint for 5-10 yards. 

Squat Jumps to Sprint 

This moves up the chain and allows us to focus on firing from the glutes in our jumps. Really focus on loading and exploding from the hips – and then again hitting those sprints. 

Alternating Lunge Jump to Sprint 

This exercise adds some complexity and allows us to load and explode from a single leg. We’re only looking for 4 jumps and then exploding into a short sprint. 

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We’ve seen NCAA  players do all sorts of variations here. Sometimes it’s just as basic as a couple of 10 yard sprints – and that’s okay too. We just really want to focus on generating that explosive twitch and forcing the nervous system to fire explosively. 

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Wrapping it up & A complete example warm up for Lacrosse 

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Alright, so we threw a lot at you in this article. 

Our goal was to give you the why and how behind a high quality workout so that you can create your own warm ups. 

This is important because it’s your responsibility to prepare your body in the best way possible. 

For some lacrosse players this means spending extra time on mobility (or a specific area of the body like adding extra hip mobility exercises) while for other athletes need more activation exercises to “feel” awake and ready to go. 

The important takeaway from this article is that you should find a way to structure your warm-up around the RAMP protocol, and then custom it to your individual needs.

In the video above, we go over a warm-up that we give a lot of lacrosse players as a foundational warm-up that they can do at the field or in the gym. This will take roughly 8 minutes, takes no space (you can do it on the spot) and hit all of our RAMP protocols. 

If you want something to screenshot and save to try next game/practice – here’s a sample warm-up (without bands): 

RAISE:

• 20 yard jog and back; 
• 20 yard jog and back;
• 10 yard shuffle with arm swing and jog back; 
• 10 yards shuffle with arm swing the other way and jog back. 

ACTIVATE:

• Walking Lunges 
• Bodyweight Squat 
• Inch Worms 
• Single Leg RDL 
• Yoga Push Ups
  

MOBILIZE

• Reverse Lunge to Reach 
• Heel Pull to Side Lunge
• World’s Greatest 
• Ankle Gliders 
• Flat Lying Pec T-Stretch
• Thread the Needle 
• Hip Swings 

POTENTIATE

• Pogo Jumps to Sprint
• Squat Jumps to Sprint
• Alternating Lunge Jump to Sprint

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— 

Hopefully this article will encourage you to take a more serious look at your warm-up. 

A lot of successful pros we talk to have created warm-up habits that they’ve had for years if not decades. 

It’s not a superstitious thing, although for some it definitely is, it’s because the habits are powerful when it comes to preparation. 

They know the exact sequence they need to go through to prepare mentally and physically for the work ahead. 
We’d encourage you to put this article into action by creating your own warm-up (or using ours) and then refining it until you have the perfect warm-up for you. 

Get dialed in & get after it! 

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